The deep political crisis in Venezuela is not only experienced in institutions, but also reaches families.
This is the case with that of Didalco Bolívar, 65, a political veteran of the Chavista hierarchy and new vice president of the National Assembly elected after the controversial December elections, in which the opposition did not participate or were recognized as legitimate by the European Union.
Close to Nicolás Maduro, Bolívar works to stabilize the government and is part of a Parliament that has announced that it will open investigations against the opposition.
The same to which Manuela Bolívar, 37, a leader of Voluntad Popular, a member of the 2007 student generation, belongs, as well as the former head of Parliament Juan Guaidó, who proclaimed himself in 2019 interim president of the country by not recognizing the legitimacy of the Chavista regime.
Close to Leopoldo López, the leader of Popular Will who now lives in Madrid, Manuela works to achieve the resignation of Maduro.
Faced in almost antithetical positions, father and daughter have to deal with a difficult personal relationship lacking in moments of normality, and over which a thick silence gravitates.
The complicated link between the two portrays part of the daily life of the country: parents and children, entire families, with very broken or broken relationships because of politics.
Publicly, the political confrontation is assumed by both with clear discomfort and rarely, if ever, do they comment on it.
In private, at least outside the family environment, the secrecy is even greater.
The relationship between Didalco and Manuela Bolívar, according to the sources consulted, is intermittent and hardly formal.
In the nineties, before the presidency of Hugo Chávez (from 1999 until his death, in March 2013), when Manuela was a girl, Didalco Bolívar was a member of the Movement to Socialism, founded by Teodoro Petkoff, a left-wing party that turned towards social democracy.
He was governor of the State of Aragua, in the central zone of the country.
When Chávez presented his presidential candidacy in 1998, Bolívar broke with Petkoff and decided to accompany the lieutenant colonel, with whom he began a long relationship that also had moments of tension.
He always occupied a space among the moderate sectors of Chavismo, and won four elections to lead the governorship of the State of Aragua until 2008.
After being a loyal lieutenant for years, Bolívar began to have problems with the Miraflores palace when Chávez decided to radicalize his program.
It was then that the self-styled commander called on his allies to join a single party of the Bolivarian Revolution, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, something to which Bolívar and other allies refused.
In 2009, Didalco Bolívar requested political asylum in Peru, where he lived for two years with the nascent Venezuelan dissidence after being accused of corruption by officials of the Chávez government.
That was one of the few occasions in which his daughter Manuela, then a little-known student leader, publicly defended him at a press conference, demanding a fair trial for her father.
"In Venezuela the rule of law is over, the judiciary has become a faction and does not act on behalf of all citizens," he declared.
Bolívar decided to return to Venezuela in 2011 after agreeing on the conditions for a judicial settlement with Chavismo.
Instead of joining the opposition, as was thought, he decided to rejoin the ranks of the Chavista revolution.
Personal fracture
With Nicolás Maduro in the presidency, as of 2013, Bolívar's ties with the new president were much better than with Chávez.
Didalco became a palace official.
Maduro appointed him president of the Institute for the Development of Small and Medium Industries, while Manuela became a well-known Leopoldist leader of the opposition.
The two extremes of the country's public debate.
“It is from that moment that relations between the two get worse.
They got very far away, ”says a source close to Manuela.
“They [father and daughter] had a strong lawsuit once in 2007 and then they had other important arguments that alienated them.
For a long time they did not speak.
They have eventually reconnected, but see little of each other.
It is a kind of taboo, she does not like to talk about it and her father less.
It is true that they have tried to settle their differences to find a minimum common ground ”, comments another acquaintance of Manuela's generation.
"It is part of the current tragedy of the country, Chavismo has not only fractured institutions, it has fractured families," Manuela Bolívar once said in an interview with CNN en Español in 2016, when they mentioned the link with her father, which he avoided even citing.
“My family is the example of many others in Venezuela.
It is valid to think differently ”.
The political and personal rupture between father and daughter worsened in 2014, when the first street protests against Nicolás Maduro broke out and were vigorously repressed by the forces of order.
Manuela was then an emerging activist, megaphone in hand, calling out to the streets and forming leaders in the democratic field through the Futuro Presente foundation.
She was then accused by the Ministry of the Interior and Justice of fomenting terrorism.
Meanwhile, his father was sitting next to Maduro in the Miraflores palace, in conversations with the opposition that did not resolve the crisis that continues to plague the country.
A grandson as the main link in the family
Daughter of her father's first marriage, Manuela Bolívar, a psychologist from the Andrés Bello Catholic University, has traditionally been very close to her mother, Marilyn Rivas.
"When she came to Caracas from Maracay [capital of the State of Aragua, where she was born and where her father was governor], she distanced herself 100% from her father," says a friend from those years.
"She has always been very supported by her maternal family," she adds.
Divorced from Rivas, Didalco Bolívar later married Marietta Maarraoui, linked to business groups in Aragua.
Another offspring of Didalco is married to one of the daughters of Elvis Amoroso, head of the Comptroller (Court of Accounts) of the Nicolás Maduro regime.
Didalco Bolívar called his daughter to find out how she was when Manuela was attacked by Chavista mobs while pregnant, some seven years ago, in a protest near the Federal Legislative Palace in Caracas.
An indissoluble link between the two is Rodrigo, Manuela's son.